Is life easier in the big cities?

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For me, yes, life is a lot easier in a big city. Being surrounded by strangers is a lot easier than meeting the same people every day.

Vanilla_Slice

My boyfriend and I are both aspies, and we've both just moved from Amherst, MA (a small town) to Pittsburgh, PA (a mid-sized city). So far, not including the stress of moving, living in Pittsburgh is much less stressful than living in Amherst.

Amherst is a small, insular town with no jobs, high cost of living, rude and unfriendly people, and a major state university (UMass) right in the middle of it, making the town unlivable during the academic year.

Pittsburgh, on the other hand, has lots of jobs, extremely low cost of living, friendly and helpful people, and is large enough to support its many universities (Pitt, Carnegie-Mellon, Duquesne, etc.). It has free and plentiful public transportation so that people like me without a car can get around, and it has many houses in nice areas selling for under $100,000.

Pittsburgh also has a very large and active autism community. Our Asperger's support group has nearly seventy members, as opposed to our Western Massachusetts support group, which has only about twenty members.

I grew up in a small town (Yellow Springs, Ohio), and moved to Amherst in part because it was also a small town (I went there to train in the Alexander Technique, a form of sensory-motor education). What I found, however, was that whereas small towns are okay places to grow up, they simply do not have the resources that I need as an adult Aspergian. I need lots of job opportunities, so that when I get fired from one job, I have others to choose from. I need lots of people resources, so that when I alienate one person, there are other people to be friends with, do business with, etc. I think that unless one has a very closely knit and supportive group of people in one's town that can help supply necessary resources (shelter, work, friendship, partnership), cities are much better places for those of us on the spectrum to live. Due to their size and relatively supply of resources, it is less likely that any one individual will become the resident scapegoat, as often happens to those of us who live in small towns.

My $0.02

~ Caterina

Is life easier in big cities. It depends on public transportation, actual things to do, cultural facilities, the job market, etc. As soon as I get a decent job and secure a decent place to live, I will be moving back to my birthplace: Washington, DC. Even though I live in College Park, MD where there is sufficient public transport I just want to go back where I was born.

I think it goes both ways. I live in Milwaukee which is I guess a mid-size city relative to LA, New York, Chicago etc. but pretty big(about 600,000 in the city and 1.8 million in the metro area) to me. I've lived in the actual city all my life and not a suburb. My parents aren't rich and work for the city so I had to go MPS which frankly is one of the worst school districts in the US. It's a bloated inefficient bureaucracy with dismal graduation rates. It's probably like that in any reasonably sized working class city though sadly. While the school system allowed me anonymity with it's huge size it was also very long before anyone helped me. I was one of the lucky ones too with a very insistent mother who didn't give up. A lot, probably most, of the people that far behind(luckily for me it was just the grades and behavior than not knowing what I need to know) would of fell through the cracks. Even when "help" arrived it was more or less just getting me to graduate high school and nothing else. That's all over and done with now but if I ever have kids, they will not go to MPS.

I don't think I'd like living in the middle of nowhere but living right outside the city would be the best of both worlds in my opinion.

As for small towns, the "art colonies" will probably be more tolerant.

Examples would include:

Arcata, CA
Santa Fe, NM
Taos, NM
Park City, UT
Burlington, VT

(I, personally, wouldn't live in Vermont, though.)

Even Texas has towns like that. In far west Texas, the town of Marfa is becoming an artist mecca. It's also known for the setting of the movie Giant (with James Dean), and the "Marfa Lights".

Being in a rural area attached to no town is the easiest for me, and it's also what I prefer.

Rural = no damn people, no noise of cars and said people; no excess visual clutter that just kills my visual processing, etcetera and etcetera.

I currently live in Washington, DC. I used to live in Orlando, FL. There were good things about both. In Orlando, I quit my job and was able to find another one fairly quickly. I hated driving everywhere though. Driving would give me meltdowns sometimes...especially when I would get stuck in traffic during hot weather. Traffic is not a good thing for an aspie, I had some bad experiences with that. Washington, DC has good public transportation and you don't need to drive if you live there. The people don't talk to you on the Metro. Sometimes you can run into crazy people on the bus, but I just put on my headphones and pretend they're not there. This is not unusal for anyone to do in a big city. If you can live in city with good public transportation, I would suggest it.

Personally I like the sound of cars so it doesn't bother me to have a busy street outside my window. The crowds are the only thing that can overload me. Generally, I don't go on the subway during rush hour though.

All this mentioning of Pittsburgh makes me a bit homesick...

I'm glad that so many people like Pittsburgh. It's beautiful and all that, low cost of living, etc. For me, though, I just needed to get out of my home town. I never quite got the sports mania thing. It's like a citywide obsession, and if you really don't care so much, you're viewed as a little bit off.

That and there weren't enough people my age to hang out with (single and in their twenties and thirties). That sounds like a very un-Aspieish thing to say, but I don't think it is. I love meeting people who allow themselves to show their real side. What I mean by that are people who express themselves genuinely and share themselves openly. It seems like some people never really "open up," and that makes me sad.

It seemed like most people in Pittsburgh had settled down already with a family... or at least that's how it seemed 10 years ago. So it was just hard to meet those folks. And you kind of want a general age bracket of folks you can meet and befriend.

I've lived in rural/small suburban area all my life.

I live in a small-ish town and I really want to live in a big, cosmopolitan city that is full of life and where I don't meet people from primary school everywhere I go. It's probably the biggest wish of mine, to live in a big city.

i'm a new york city native with AS and i hate it here. i meet too many new people on a regular basis to be comfortable. walking down the street is harsh since every time someone bumps into me it makes me feel gross. it's loud, ridiculously so. there are lights flashing everywhere. dirt, a lot of dirt, is a fact of life. nature is put in little boxes for our amusement. not wanting to go clubbing is something of a sin.

people are rude and nosey. they treat each other like trash all the time be they strangers or family. there's also a great deal of crime and violence. every day i see about a dozen homeless people and homeless animals in varying states of ill health. there's a lot of poverty to be witnessed after all it's incredibly expensive here.

the only good things i can say of living in the city is that it's fun to visit. (living here for a long time, u eventually realize that even in a city as big as this one you can feel like you've nothing to do.) also the libraries have a lot of books...even if getting them can be a hassle.

a small town would be tough for me, but i'm thinking that somewhere less "larger than life" is better for most people, myself especially.